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Looking Inside Himself for a Breakthrough

ARDMORE, Pa. — Given a one-night break from parenting duties last year, Brandt Snedeker and his wife, Mandy, decided to watch “Moneyball” in their Nashville hotel room. Before it was half over, Snedeker’s wife was asleep and he had awakened the possibilities for taking his golf career to another level.

The movie, which tells the story of the way the small-market Oakland Athletics used outside-the-box statistical analysis to compete successfully against talent-rich competition, resonated with Snedeker, who is not the longest, straightest or most accurate hitter in golf.

Ranked seventh, Snedeker is a perennial leader in the nice-guy category, but even that comes with a caveat. He had to find an edge somewhere if he wanted to compete against preternaturally talented players like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Adam Scott, the top three in the world rankings.

So last year Snedeker decided to borrow a spreadsheet from Billy Beane, the Athletics general manager whose success with the mathematical analysis of baseball data became the subject of the book and movie “Moneyball.”

“I’ve gotten more into that as a way to understand who I am as a golfer and how to maximize my God-given ability,” said Snedeker, 32. “I’m not a freak of nature. I don’t swing at the ball perfectly every time. I putt pretty well, so it’s understanding your strengths and playing to them using the historical data that’s out there.”

Using statistics as his guide to everything, including which tournaments to enter and which holes to play aggressively, Snedeker has experienced his own star turn. In six months beginning last September, he won two of his five tour titles, including the 2012 Tour Championship, a victory that propelled him to the FedEx Cup crown.

Ten years into Snedeker’s professional odyssey, two items remain on his career checklist: a major victory and a No. 1 ranking. Snedeker’s search for a major title has been waylaid by two Masters fades, most recently this April, and mysterious ailments, but he feels as if he is finally on the right track.

“I’ve been on a lot of ups, and I’ve kind of been on a downward trend right now,” Snedeker said. “But I really feel like I’m on my way back up again. I feel like I’m on top of this and it’s going in the right direction.”

Nobody would be surprised if Snedeker’s major breakthrough came this week at the United States Open. He is a strong putter with sound course management, which is a solid combination at Merion Golf Club, a track with narrow fairways, blind and semiblind shots and small greens.

It is a matter of which player shows up for Thursday’s opening round: the Snedeker of the winter or the Snedeker of the spring. In his first 19 competitive rounds of the year, he had one victory and two runner-up finishes, posted 16 sub-70 scores and compiled a 67.5 stroke average. In his last 20 competitive rounds, Snedeker has no top-5 finishes, two sub-70 rounds and a stroke average of 72.3. He missed the cut at his last two tournaments.

If the start of the year was like “waking up every day in a dream world,” as Snedeker described it at the time, what have the last three months been?

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Brandt Snedeker, who improved his golf game by statistical analysis, has also overcome a mystery ailment.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

“Reality,” he said with a laugh last week at the PGA Tour stop in Memphis. “Golf does a great job of you get moments where you feel like you can do no wrong, and you get moments where you feel like you can do no right. And golf has an unbelievable ability that the minute you think you’ve got it figured out, to slap you in the face and show you what reality is.”

Snedeker’s slump can be traced to the latest in a series of injuries that defied explanation. Since turning pro in 2004, he has had surgery on both hips and at least four cracked ribs. He won the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in February while playing the last day with a muscle strain between his ribs that sidelined him for the next six weeks.

Snedeker’s wife spurred him to seek answers for his injuries, which he said she described as “not normal for someone your age.”

Snedeker spent four months undergoing tests before doctors determined that he has low-turnover bone disease, so his body is slow to regenerate bone. Snedeker was relieved by the diagnosis. So was his older brother, Haymes, who worried that he might be responsible for Snedeker’s fragility.

“I really am truly surprised one of his injuries isn’t related to something my friends and I did to him as a child,” Haymes Snedeker said.

Since May, Snedeker has been taking nightly injections of Forteo, a drug commonly used to treat osteoporosis. The first time Snedeker held the needle to his abdomen, he became squeamish; Mandy thought she was going to have to give him the shot. But the process quickly became second nature to Snedeker, like flossing his teeth.

“It’s just a weird thing I’ve got to deal with,” said Snedeker, who described the injections as a minor inconvenience.

The shot-transporting is another story. The medicine has to be kept refrigerated, which has Snedeker fretting over the logistics of traveling abroad for the British Open next month.

“I haven’t figured out how we’re going to get it over there,” he said. “So that will be the first problem I see arising.”

Before last week’s tournament in Memphis, Snedeker sat for a national telephone radio interview, his hands waving wildly as if directing the words tumbling from his lips. His tendency to punctuate his sentences with animated gestures is a tic that amuses his wife, who has suggested he try to tone down his body language now that he is drawing more notice, lest Snedeker wind up with a public relations problem.

“We’ll be out at dinner and he’ll be leaning forward and his hands are in my face,” she said, and “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, anyone who’s looking at him right now is going to think we’re fighting or he’s really angry about something.’ ”

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Brandt Snedeker during his victory at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February.Credit
Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Snedeker is more likely to make an albatross on a long par 5 than a scene. His idea of losing his cool on the golf course is exclaiming “Golly!” after an errant shot. He has a reputation for decency that is born of small gestures: interrupting a practice round in Memphis to exchange greetings with a greenskeeper atop a tractor, or making small talk with a teenage tournament volunteer after she interrupted Snedeker during a range session to say he is her favorite golfer.

There is another side to Snedeker, which Mandy picked up on shortly after they met at Vanderbilt. She asked about his golf season, and he said he had a handful of second-place finishes.

More than a decade later, nothing has changed but the level of competition.

“I’m not going to go out of my way to help somebody out here, help them hit it better if they’re struggling,” Snedeker said. “I think at the end of the day they’re trying to take money off your table. They’re trying to tell everybody that they’re a better player than you are. To me, that’s not acceptable.”

On golf’s wall of intensity hang images of the bug-eyed, nostril-flared stare of Ian Poulter and the X-ray glare of Woods. Room should be cleared for the Opie Taylor-meets-Chucky face of Snedeker, who lowers his chin, purses his lips and freezes his prey with a venomous stare.

“I probably see that look the most,” his caddie, Scott Vail, said with a laugh. “It’s part of my job to take the brunt of it.”

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“People see this nice-guy persona I have, and I do try to be a genuinely nice person,” Snedeker said. “But I still want to beat everyone out here badly. I do a good job playing it off, but I definitely have an edge to me.”

Snedeker and his brother, who grew up in Nashville, speak of his competitiveness as if it were a survival skill that he had to acquire early. Haymes Snedeker is five years older, and he did not appreciate having his little brother underfoot.

“There is no doubt I was mean to him,” Haymes said in a telephone interview from Fairhope, Ala., where he is a lawyer and judge. “I think there was a little resentment where I made him pay a physical and emotional price for being out with the older kids probably more than I desired.”

Their wrestling matches turned into one-sided boxing bouts, and football tackles morphed into poundings, and the commentary on Brandt Snedeker’s shortcomings on the golf course was nonstop. Worst of all was when Haymes locked Brandt, who was terrified of the dark, in a closet and told him it was his punishment for playing poorly.

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Brandt Snedeker with his swing coach, Todd Anderson, on Wednesday. A perfectionist, he has also improved his game with statistical analysis.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

“I still do lay awake at night and wonder if I was too hard on him,” Haymes said. “I’m sure emotionally he was scarred for a period of time. Sometimes I felt so guilty about it, but when I see how much success he’s had in his career, I do feel somewhat responsible for his tenacity on the golf course. I do think I played a part in toughening him up.”

Haymes and his friends played a part in Snedeker’s exemplary short game, too. As a youngster, Snedeker rarely was able to reach the par 4s in regulation. He was always shorter off the tee, so to keep pace with his bigger and stronger playing companions he had to be better from 70 yards in.

“Even to this day, my swing’s so natural and his is kind of acquired,” said Haymes, a winner of Golf Channel’s “Big Break” show in 2008. “But his short game cannot be taught. It’s all his own.”

Brandt finished first in the PGA Tour’s putting statistic last year, which he attributes to tenacity. After tournament rounds, he has been known to spend so much time on the practice greens trying to perfect his stroke that Vail, his caddie, will jokingly ask if he should find floodlights. Snedeker’s routine is to stick tees in spots around the hole and putt until he holes a designated number in an exercise similar to an Around the World drill in basketball.

On the tour, the role once played by Haymes Snedeker is filled by Mickelson and Woods, who have made Snedeker tougher with every beating they have administered on the course. Snedeker’s victory at the Tour Championship was all the more rewarding because Woods and Mickelson were in the field.

“People may think they can kind of push me around,” Snedeker said, “but having an older brother who was very, very hard with the needle with me, I am comfortable giving it back.”

He added, “I love playing with Tiger and Phil, because they both give it to me and they take it really well.”

Phil Mickelson, 42, has become a sounding board for Snedeker.

“He’s been through everything you can go through in the game of golf, so anything that comes up that I have questions about I text him and ask, ‘What do you think?’ ” Snedeker said of Mickelson.

At the Ryder Cup last year, Snedeker spoke with Mickelson about handling defeat.

“As great as he is about winning,” Snedeker said, “I think he’s probably the best ever after a loss, the way he’s able to talk to people, convey what he’s feeling without revealing too much. He gave me some great advice.”

Mickelson told Snedeker he had to separate the criticism he received for his play from his identity as a person.

“I never drew that line,” Snedeker said. “So that was really good to hear.”

One of Snedeker’s most enjoyable defeats came at the hands of Mickelson at the Phoenix Open in February, when they were paired in the final group. On the first tee, Mickelson, who started the day with a six-stroke lead, told Snedeker, “You better bring you’re A game today because I want your best.”

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Big Golf on a Little Course

Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa., is hosting the United States Open, but the grounds are so small, it’s like bringing the Super Bowl to a small college football field.

“Even though I lost it was great because he was pushing me and I was pushing him, but we were giving it to each other all day,” Snedeker said.

Mickelson says he peppers Snedeker with questions about putting because he is so good at it, which raises the question: if Mickelson asked Snedeker to help him with his stroke, would he do it?

“I’d love to give Phil a tip,” Snedeker said with a sparkle in his eyes, “because I’d hold it over him for the rest of his life. So it’d be great.”

Mickelson said, “I love being around him because he trash-talks in such a funny way.”

Writing a New Ending

Arriving at the Masters this year with a meticulous game plan, Snedeker executed it beautifully for three and a half rounds. The co-leader after 54 holes, Snedeker spoke on the eve of the final round like someone who was done picking at the scab from the 2008 Masters, where he went into the final day with the lead and carded a 77 to finish tied for third.

This year, paired on Sunday with the former Masters champion Ángel Cabrera, Snedeker missed a three-foot par putt at No. 10, three-putted for a bogey at 11 and missed a six-foot putt for birdie on 12 on his way to a 75 and a tie for sixth. Cabrera closed with a 69 that propelled him into a playoff against Scott, who won on the second extra hole.

“All the guys that are really good in this game have an innate ability to push themselves, no matter what’s happening, to kind of will themselves to make putts when they need to,” Snedeker said. “And on the back nine Sunday at Augusta, I didn’t find a way to make those putts.”

He added: “As hard as it was, it was really fun to see Ángel hit the shots he did coming down the stretch because that’s the way I envisioned winning a Masters. Even though he didn’t win, it was really fun to watch and see him do that.”

Paul Azinger, an ESPN analyst, said he expected Snedeker to use his latest near miss at Augusta National as another base camp on the way to a major summit.

“Thomas Edison — who knows how many light bulbs he tried to make before he came out with the one that’s still burning to this day,” Azinger said.

Until Snedeker captured the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup title, his signature moment in golf had been his tearful interview session after his collapse at the 2008 Masters. There were more tears after the final round this year, but they belonged to one of his two children, 2-year-old Lily.

“Daddy all done with golf?” she asked.

His daughter will not be happy to hear it, but a smarter, healthier, more content Snedeker is confident his best years in golf are just beginning.